AMC is venturing into zombie-drama territory with multi-hyphenate Frank Darabont.

Cabler is close to finalizing one of the richest development deals ever with Darabont to write and direct a series adaptation of the Image Comics graphic novel series "The Walking Dead," penned by Robert Kirkman. Gale Anne Hurd of Valhalla Pictures and David Alpert of Circle of Confusion are also on board to exec produce.

Project is set among a group of zombie survivors of an apocalypse who are led by a police officer, Rick Grimes, in search of a safe place to live. Numerous editions of the "Walking Dead" graphic novels have been published since 2003.

Joel Stillerman, AMC's senior veep of programming, production and original content, said the project appealed to the cabler because of "the quality of the storytelling" in Kirkman's work. The series will stay faithful to the tone of the original novels, he said.

"This is not about zombies popping out of closets," Stillerman said. "This is a story about survival, and the dynamics of what happens when a group is forced to survive under these circumstances. The world (in 'Walking Dead') is portrayed in a smart, sophisticated way."

Stillerman noted that the cabler's annual "Fear Fest" movie showcase around Halloween is one of AMC's most popular programming events of the year.

"We've got an audience that loves this kind of material," he said.

Darabont and Hurd pitched the project to AMC and several other outlets. There is no studio attached yet. The duo's involvement made the project a must-have for the cabler, Stillerman said.

"These are two world-class filmmakers who are also brilliant storytellers with experience in the fantasy genre," he said.

In its biggest development deal to date, AMC has acquired the rights to Robert Kirkman's popular comic book "The Walking Dead" for a potential series.

Frank Darabont is on board to write, direct and exec produce the project, with Gale Anne Hurd of Valhalla Pictures and David Alpert of Circle of Confusion also executive producing.

"Walking Dead," a monthly black-and-white comic book, has been a hotly sought-after property since it was published in 2003 by Image Comics. Darabont originally developed the project several years ago under his deal at NBC. It landed at AMC after a healthy bidding war.

"Dead" chronicles the months and years following a zombie apocalypse where a group of survivors, led by police officer Rick Grimes, travel in search of a safe, secure home. The comic explores the challenges of life in a world overrun by zombies that take a toll on the survivors. Over time, they grow willing to do anything to survive, so the interpersonal conflicts sometimes present a greater danger to their continuing survival than the zombies who roam the country.

But a "Dead" series would transcend the comic book genre and mesh with AMC's other drama offerings, "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad," said Joel Stillerman, senior vp original programming, production and digital content.

"I don't know of another series of books that has such beautiful storytelling, great human emotions and everything that really works on AMC," he said. "It allows us to stay where we want to stay: in the world of smart, sophisticated storytelling and apply that to a show that we think the audience would love."

Darabont, an Oscar nominee for writing "The Green Mile" and "The Shawshank Redemption," is repped by CAA.

Last edited by TheButcher on Wed Aug 12, 2009 6:50 am, edited 1 time in total.

I've been hoping this would go to television since I read the first book.And Darabont?!? DARABONT?!?!? Awesome!!!!I hope it works.... and that if they stick to the book's stories that they don't have to stray too much for censors.

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travis-dane wrote:Cool. I just read the comics up until the point where the group makes the prison their home and the badass samurai lady shows up. I need to catch up.Looking forward to seeing it on my screen. HBO!

They said AMC picked it up. HBO would have been better, but AMC has put out some quality stuff.

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Yeah, AMC is going to have to walk a fine line. Walking Dead portrays some of the worst aspects of human behavior. I am not sold on AMC's ability to adaquately portray that. The moment you sense the show is "holding back" because it is too graphic or something is the moment the story stops working.

Leckomaniac wrote:Yeah, AMC is going to have to walk a fine line. Walking Dead portrays some of the worst aspects of human behavior. I am not sold on AMC's ability to adaquately portray that. The moment you sense the show is "holding back" because it is too graphic or something is the moment the story stops working.

Just my two cents.

Is AMC a cable channel like HBO? or is it basic cable and has rules it needs to follow?I wonder where the line is drawn between cable and basic cable? What can basic cable do?The Shield was a basic cable show right? The Shield was very violent and mature, but then again on Carnivale, which was a HBO show, they show a girl doing a handstand and then spreading her legs for a full view on her nude pussy.Whats up with that?Shine a light there guys.

Leckomaniac wrote:Yeah, AMC is going to have to walk a fine line. Walking Dead portrays some of the worst aspects of human behavior. I am not sold on AMC's ability to adaquately portray that. The moment you sense the show is "holding back" because it is too graphic or something is the moment the story stops working.

Just my two cents.

I'm thinking they'll have trouble showing some of the stuff that happens with some of the younger characters.

Also kind of curious about how expensive it will be to depict the regularly occuring characters that have lost parts of their limbs.

I read this news while sitting on the toilet delivering some baked goods. I nearly screamed with delight. A co-worker, who is an avid AICN-er, but not here on the forum, works with me. I texted him this news immediately. I got no response.

I caught up with said friend later in the day. He was drinking a Pepsi when I told him the news. His eyes lit up like a fucking supernova. We then high fived.

I am not a HUGE Darabont fan, but this material is a perfect match. I don't know who to think, because I don't believe in god really. So I will thank Burl Ives.

One thing I hope Darabont does is to not let every character be on the front line when it comes to dying. The most painful parts of Walking Dead to me are where awesome secondary characters get snuffed.

burlivesleftnut wrote:One thing I hope Darabont does is to not let every character be on the front line when it comes to dying. The most painful parts of Walking Dead to me are where awesome secondary characters get snuffed.

That's one aspect I love - no one is safe.

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I've been meaning to pick up The Walking Dead trade paperbacks for quite some time now, but I have a healthy respect (bordering on fear) for the addictive power of comic books. Buying them could start me down a path that I don't wish to revisit.

I've been meaning to pick up The Walking Dead trade paperbacks for quite some time now, but I have a healthy respect (bordering on fear) for the addictive power of comic books. Buying them could start me down a path that I don't wish to revisit.

The Walking Dead is highly addicting and pretty gut wrenching. I had to stop reading at several points because the shit that happened to these people would get to be too much.

Kirkman's Walking Dead and Invincible are two of the shining jewels for current mainstream comics. And both are like crack, you will twitch waiting to get your next fix.

I've been meaning to pick up The Walking Dead trade paperbacks for quite some time now, but I have a healthy respect (bordering on fear) for the addictive power of comic books. Buying them could start me down a path that I don't wish to revisit.

The Walking Dead is highly addicting and pretty gut wrenching. I had to stop reading at several points because the shit that happened to these people would get to be too much.

Kirkman's Walking Dead and Invincible are two of the shining jewels for current mainstream comics. And both are like crack, you will twitch waiting to get your next fix.

Just found out that the library has a bunch of the trades; volumes 1 - 5, not vol. 6 (huh?) and vol. 7. I'm going to have to get cracking on this series. Don't understand the omission of vol.6 though.

Well, just a quick read of which issues are in Vol 6 might be the answer.

Some of the most fucked up shit to happen in the series occurs in Vol. 6. I suppose it is possible that the library just couldn't agree to carry that particular volume because it crossed the line? I mean, shit goes down in all the issues but I believe vol. 6 has some of the worst.

Or maybe it is something else entirely. Good luck MadCap. It will be a harrowing journey.

Is there such a thing as having too much dead people in your entertainment quota?

The answer to that question will only be known if AMC decides to give a greenlight to a TV series based on Robert Kirkman's ongoing comic book series about life after the zombie apocalypse, The Walking Dead. If you haven't been paying attention, the 2000s saw the zombie finally rise to mainstream status with a horde of well-received movies in this monster genre: the Resident Evil films (with a fourth now in production); a remake of Dawn of the Dead; 28 Days Later and its sequel which gave the idea of a slow moving corpse a twist with its fast runners; zombie comedies Zombieland and Fido; and the return of the father of modern zombie cinema, George A. Romero, with two new ghoul films, Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead (and there's a third forthcoming, Survival of the Dead.)

With all of that box office success one would think that television executives would be looking to cash in on the zombie hype and get a TV series on the air. Actually, one network did try: back in 2007 CBS ordered a pilot called Babylon Fields which could be best described as a drama set after the dead return from the grave. After viewing the pilot the network decided that the show didn't fit in with the network's fall schedule, and so a series was never ordered. So much for zombies on the tube, right?

Well, not really. Just like any good zombie it's hard to keep the idea of a zombie TV series dead and buried. Last summer the rights to Kirkman's Walking Dead were sold to AMC. Fans of the book may have felt somewhat reassured when it was also mentioned that Frank Darabont would be directing the pilot, as well as writing the pilot's screenplay and serving as an executive producer on the show. The director of The Shawshank Redemption, The Majestic, The Green Mile and The Mist, Darabont was also a producer on a proposed sequel to The Thing, the 1982 John Carpenter movie. Unfortunately that four-hour mini-series never got further than the screenplay stage, but when I reviewed it last year, I found the script to be an outstanding idea for a continuation of The Thing. If Darabont could bring some of that quality found in the Thing mini-series sequel to The Walking Dead TV show, then AMC's Mad Men audience may be in for a real ride.

Only as recently as last week did AMC order a pilot to be made from Darabont's Walking Dead screenplay. If the cable network likes what they see then there'll be a Walking Dead TV series coming as soon as this fall or perhaps around the start of 2011. So, here is the big question: does Darabont's Walking Dead pilot have the necessary ingredients to be not just a decent horror TV series but a good drama?

The answer: Yes, it does.

Contained in Darabont's 60-page pilot script are all the elements to make the show a success. There's plenty of horror that happens in those 60 pages. The director's script covers the broad range of the zombie horror emotional spectrum, such as giving us moments of extreme gore (hey, any zombie TV show wouldn't be a zombie show if it didn't have folks being munched on!), moments of shock value (hey, you didn't think that there was a zombie hiding behind that car, did you?) and the moments that I believe are the best indicator that The Walking Dead TV series has what it takes to transcend the boundaries of being simply labelled a horror show, the psychological horror scenes. Those scenes are the hammers that you're going to remember and the ones that are going to propel this show to be viewed as something more important than just a scary show.

If you're familiar with the beginnings of the comic then you'll be on familiar ground when you watch the pilot episode, even though it would appear that Darabont isn't interested in making a direct adaptation of the comic book's origin story. Our hero is Officer Rick Grimes, a deputy for a small Georgia town outside of Atlanta. About 15 pages into our story Grimes is involved in a police incident where he receives a near-fatal injury. After being taken to the hospital and falling into a short coma, our law enforcement man awakens to find the hospital empty and the telltale signs that something very bad has gone down while he was out. The way that Darabont chooses to introduce Grimes to the post-zombie world is nearly identical to the opening moments of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later but it's forgivable; the impact of the changed world is that much more heightened with Grimes serving as our introduction to it.

From there Grimes tries to find his family, his wife Lori and their young son Carl. He returns to his home and finds the neighborhood deserted, his wife and son gone. Still not fully comprehending what's happened, Grimes is saved by another father and son who have taken up shelter in a neighbor's house. From these two survivors Grimes learns about the zombie plague and the rules of life: if you're bitten, if a zombie so much as scratches you, you become infected, you die and then you become a zombie yourself. We're also shown some of the rules of the game that the Walking Dead zombies adhere to: there are "walkers", the ones that slowly come up to you. The walkers are slow and a head shot will take them out. That said, there's a lot of walkers out there and if they decide to come at you at once, save that last bullet for yourself, you dig?

From his new neighbors Grimes is told that his family may have decided to head into Atlanta where the government was setting up a safety zone. With that info, Grimes heads off by himself and makes his way into the city. What happens in the next 20-or-so minutes is pretty intense for our hero and I want to leave it for Darabont to show to you.

I'm not sure if Darabont is the kind of guy that puts in camera effects into all of his screenplays but in his Walking Dead script there are a couple of places where he describes the visual tricks that he wants to do to heighten the surreal nature of a scene. There's a moment where Grimes is in a tough situation and has to fire a pistol at close quarters at a zombie. In the environment that he's in, Grimes is momentarily deafened by the blast. In Darabont's script, the description of what we the viewer should experience to communicate the deafness is in there. Reading that sort of scene as well as a few others like that made me more interested in seeing what Darabont's visual style is going to be in this show.

If you were a fan of the comic book before, now you know that the pilot's set-up of the Walking Dead story follows a similar arc as the comic's but it's not exact. I'd guess that about half to two-thirds of the first two issues are contained in the pilot episode but there's also new material. For instance, we now get to see the incident that brought Grimes to the hospital (the comic begins with him coming to in his deserted room) and there's some changes with what happens when he is in Atlanta that differ with the comic's depiction of events. Darabont seems to know what he's doing and in the places where he chooses to include new material, with his changes/additions better serving the story and bring more characterization (at the beginning and middle) and intensity (at the end). In particular there was a new revelation concerning the plight of the other father that Grimes finds living in his old neighborhood that's not in the comic. This new material really underscored the sense of what kind of deep and unsettling world the survivors are now living in.

Darabont's also done a solid job of knowing what works from The Walking Dead and sometimes reproducing it exactly in his screenplay, such as the case with the bicycle Grimes comes across and the reaction of its former owner to the officer's arrival.

The Walking Dead pilot doesn't sell out its concept for the sake of finding a wider audience. This is a show set in a world where families have died and the survivors haven't had the time to cope with their losses, much less come to terms with civilization collapsing around them. Knowing the course that Kirkman's comic book takes and now after seeing how Darabont's chose to make the pilot more of a drama than a flat-out horror action show, AMC's Walking Dead has fantastic potential. The Walking Dead could even do for horror what the new Battlestar Galactica did for science fiction. Cross your fingers and hope that the show comes together as well as it did on the page.

AMC has given a series greenlight to "The Walking Dead," the Frank Darabont-helmed adaptation of the Image Comics series by Robert Kirkman.

AMC has ordered a total of six episodes of the series that revolves around a group of survivors of a zombie apocalypse. Darabont penned and directed the pilot and will exec produce with Kirkman, Gale Anne Hurd of Valhalla Motion Pictures and David Alpert of Circle of Confusion, which will be funded entirely inhouse by AMC parent Rainbow Media. Charles Eglee, a seasoned TV drama showrunner, has also boarded the project as an exec producer.

"Dead" is targeted to preem in October, dovetailing with Halloween and AMC's annual "Fearfest" two-week marathon of horror and thriller pics.

Jon Bernthal ("The Pacific") has been cast in a lead role. The series revolves around police officer Rick Grimes, who leads a group of human survivors on a search for a safe home in a world overrun by zombies. AMC greenlighted production of a "Walking Dead" pilot back in January but ultimately decided to go straight to series after hearing Darabont's vision for a six-episode arc, and because of the desire to tie in with "Fearfest."

"He's taken the baseline road map of the underlying material and just blew it out to the next level," said Joel Stillerman, AMC's senior veep of programming, production and digital content. "There's stuff in there that will make the people who love the comics very happy and some surprises in there as well."

AMC prexy and g.m. Charlie Collier noted that "Dead" marks AMC's first foray into full ownership of one of its series. "With Frank and Gale and their entire team invested in this project, we also wanted to be fully invested in this project," he said.

Stillerman added that the property is likely to have "huge international value."

I don't think AMC has a problem with showing violence, they did censor the first few episodes of Breaking Bad for language and possibly nudity if memory serves correctly, not sure if that attitude has changed since

I have not read the books, but I love me some zombie stories. By all accounts, the comics are excellent, and I'm a big Darabont fan, so chalk me up in the "cannot wait" category.

I'm wondering if I should read the comic books or go in to the TV series fresh?? I know the comic books are great so I'm sure I'll read them at some point, I'm just not sure which way I'd rather be spoiled...

I know nothing of the comics besides the fact that they are about zombies and that they are highly regarded by lots of people... this does sound like good be a great time, perhaps the quintessential modern zombie film is best suited to the TV series format.

I thought the comics, or the first trade at least, were weak sauce. Too much like a watered down Whedon trying to write like Brian K Vaughan. You've gotta wonder how hard some of this quirky youngster speak is to write. Just make the sparky younglings well-versed in zombie movies so they can make snarky little cracks in life-and-death situations and hey presto, you have a work of modern genius. Or perhaps not. I might have even preferred Crossed and that was not so pretty. A series could be really fun though, so I won't go in too biased against it.

Seppuku wrote:I thought the comics, or the first trade at least, were weak sauce. Too much like a watered down Whedon trying to write like Brian K Vaughan. You've gotta wonder how hard some of this quirky youngster speak is to write. Just make the sparky younglings well-versed in zombie movies so they can make snarky little cracks in life-and-death situations and hey presto, you have a work of modern genius. Or perhaps not. I might have even preferred Crossed and that was not so pretty. A series could be really fun though, so I won't go in too biased against it.

Crossed, while technically not a zombie series, was much stiffer fare. I'm actually thinking of working up a script for that, although the character Horsecock might give more than a few people pause.

....but only 6 episodes?Is that just a beginning order with a possibility of more episodes tagged on for the first season?The books have a ridiculous amount of material to offer. With just 6 I don't know if that's really enough to even START with......but that's what Darabont pitched and I'm more than willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

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Fievel wrote:....but only 6 episodes?Is that just a beginning order with a possibility of more episodes tagged on for the first season?The books have a ridiculous amount of material to offer. With just 6 I don't know if that's really enough to even START with......but that's what Darabont pitched and I'm more than willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Reminds me of Breaking Bad though. The first season was only seven episodes. AMC must like to hedge their bets, laying out just enough cash to give people a taste, and then ramping up to thirteen episodes the next time around.

Frank wrote:AMC is going into it as they did with "Breaking Bad" (which, on a personal note, gets my passionate vote as being the best series on television right now, hands-down): those familiar with "Breaking Bad" may have noticed it was actually a "half season" approach consisting of 7 episodes. When that first season proved successful, AMC then transitioned to the standard 13 episodes per year as of season two.

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Who's playing Rick? Andrew Lincoln. Who? Exactly. Not that I was hoping for, or even expecting a well-known name. But this guy looks more like Shane than Rick.

Robert Kirkman wrote:"Andrew Lincoln, wow -- what an amazing find this guy is. Writing Rick Grimes month after month in the comic series, I had no idea he was an actual living breathing human being and yet here he is. I couldn't be more thrilled with how this show is coming together," said Kirkman.

In other news, Robert Kirkman has just proposed to Andrew Lincoln.

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I read the script for the pilot a few months back and it's pretty goddamn awesome. It follows the main beats of Kirkman's opening issue(s?), with a few significant additions/improvements. And the funny part is it feels remarkably like everything else that's on AMC. By which I mean it's about character, it's about the world... and structurally it could give a damn about what you're used to. Shit happens, more shit happens, awesome shit happens--and then you're at the point where any other show would hang it up for an episode, but instead Rick goes off and has a little adventure for another ten pages, leading into a great cliffhanger. It's not a pilot that spells out "this is what we're going to do every week;" rather it's a pretty fascinating Part 1 to a much larger story.

I will say that I'm a pretty mixed fan of the Kirkman comic. I love the premise and some of the drastic swerves he's thrown at the audience, but I think his writing is pretty terrible at least 2/3 of the time. Maybe it's because I've read the stories collected in trade, but every issue begins with Character A recapping to Character B what just happened, then Character A says how he feels about it and what he thinks they should do next. Then we watch Character A go off and do the thing, then come back to Character B or possibly Character C (who is impossible to distinguish from Character B because they are drawn so similarly and have very limited characterization) and discuss the thing they just did. Cut to sneak attack by zombie, Character E dying (what, who was that?!), retreat from wherever they are as zombies appear all over, end of issue. Next issue we meet up with Character A and guess what he wants to tell Character B about? Everything that just goddamn happened!! And it's funny because I thought the first few trades of Invincible were remarkably well written.